Local walks, global politics, and the adventures of a frolicsome border collie

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Get the smelling salts, quick

This would be funny if the context were not so tragic. AIPAC Democrats in Congress, as Juan Cole aptly describes them, are swooning and fainting and threatening to boycott the appearance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki before that august body unless Maliki apologizes for criticizing Israel's barbaric attacks on Lebanon, and denounces Hizbullah as a terrorist organization. A bunch of House Democrats sent a letter to Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert demanding that the invitation to Maliki be revoked unless he publicly recants.

I've been trying to get the full text of the letter, so far without success, but fortunately Arthur Silber provides an executive summary of the message to Maliki:

After we destroy your country and unleash a vicious civil war which takes the lives of between 100 and 200 innocent Iraqis every day, and after we see that you are installed as leader of this dying country and prop up your doomed and ineffectual government, we expect you to repeat our propaganda without question or criticism. If you do not, you obviously cannot expect to be warmly received in Rome. We have lost American lives and treasure on this disastrous venture. True, we had no justifiable reason whatsoever for taking these actions, and it was absolutely none of our goddamned business. But we did so anyway, out of the endless beneficence of our magnanimous, "civilizing" hearts. So you will express appropriate thanks, you ungrateful bastard. Otherwise, get the hell out of town.

The US Congress, aside from a strange inability to recognize the disproportionate use of force when it sees it, does not seem to realize that the Dawa Party of Iraq, from which Nuri al-Maliki hails, is a revolutionary Shiite religious party not that much different from the Lebanese Hizbullah.

The members of Congress also don't seem to realize that the Iraqi Dawa helped to form the Lebanese Hizbullah back in the early 1980s.

...did they really think [Maliki] was going to condemn Hizbullah and take Israel's side?

And if he did, do they think that the Shiite religious parties that backed him would let him stay in office?

I am continually amazed, if dismayed, at the lethal combination of ignorance and arrogance displayed by American politicians when it comes to international affairs.